Kentucky profile

35,000 people from Kentucky are behind bars today

Rates of imprisonment have grown dramatically in the last 40 years

More than third of the people held in jails in Kentucky are held for federal or state agencies, primarily the state prison system. To avoid counting them twice, this population is not included in the yellow jails line. For annual counts of people in jails held for federal or state authorizes in Kentucky, see our table "Jail and prison incarcerated populations by state over time."
Also see these Kentucky graphs:

This graph excludes people held for state or federal authorities from the total count of people held in Kentucky jails. Because a tremendous proportion (43%) of the population in Kentucky’s jails is held for the state prison system, this graph likely overstates the convicted population and understates the pre-trial population.

Today, Kentucky’s incarceration rates stand out internationally

In the U.S., incarceration extends beyond prisons and local jails to include other systems of confinement. The U.S. and state incarceration rates in this graph include people held by these other parts of the justice system, so they may be slightly higher than the commonly reported incarceration rates that only include prisons and jails. Details on the data are available in States of Incarceration: The Global Context. We also have a version of this graph focusing on the incarceration of women.

People of color are overrepresented in prisons and jails

These graphs use U.S. Census data for all people incarcerated in the state, including people in federal and state prisons, local jails, halfway houses, etc. While state and local facilities contain people processed by the Kentucky judicial systems, the federal prisons contain people sent to those facilities by courts all over the country.

For our purposes, the fact that federal prison populations are included in the Census Bureau's data as residents of Kentucky would be an unimportant statistical quirk except for that fact that there are so many people in federal prisons in Kentucky. In fact, 20% of the incarcerated people that the Census counted in Kentucky were in a federal prison. This has a dramatic impact of the demographics of the incarcerated population. If the Census Bureau's federal prison counts were removed from this analysis, the incarceration rates would be 628 for Whites, 625 for Hispanics, 2397 for Blacks, and 1023 for American Indian and Alaska Natives.

Kentucky's criminal justice system is more than just its prisons and jails